Category Archives: Europe / International

Anything to do with European / international issues

Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP

Sarah Ludford MEP writes: Passengers should be able to opt out of body scanning

By Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP | Wed 4th May 2011 - 9:38 am

The EU is considering whether to enlarge the list of techniques approved under its aviation security regulations beyond physical searches or metal detectors, and if so with what safeguard provisions.
 
In the meantime, individual Member States can trial security scanners known as ‘whole body’ scanners – or more popularly as ‘naked’ bodyscanners – and apply their own rules. They are currently in use at many European as well as American airports.
 
In the UK, they are being trialled at Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports, governed by the 1982 Aviation Security Act and an interim Code of Practice issued last year. A permanent …

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Alexis Rowell

Opinion: we must learn lessons from German Greens

By Alexis Rowell | Tue 5th April 2011 - 6:08 pm

It is interesting to note last weekend’s election results from Germany in the context of Nick Clegg and David Laws’ attempts to turn the Liberal Democrats into an economic liberal party. There is an economic liberal party in Germany – it’s called the Free Democratic Party (FDP). On Sunday in state elections in Baden-Württemberg and in Rhineland-Palatinate they got trounced. In the former poll they barely made it into the state parliament with 5.3% of the vote; in the latter they didn’t cross the 5% threshold and are no longer represented.

One thing that has changed in …

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Mark Pack

In other news…

By Mark Pack | Tue 15th March 2011 - 9:53 pm

As Alex Foster pointed out on Twitter, Europe is rather complicated – even when itemised in this helpful diagram.

Sometimes a blog post that is nearly all just a long list of village names can be extremely effective, as Paul Walter demonstrated.

Gary Hunt has been selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of Leicester…

… and former Liberal Democrat candidate Vincent McKee, who has been at the centre of allegations of fraud, has been required to repay £1,000 according to the Coventry Telegraph.

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Rob Blackie

Opinion: It’s time for a no-fly zone

By Rob Blackie | Tue 15th March 2011 - 11:09 am

In 1984 a young aeronautical engineer called Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy,an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, was hanged in a basketball stadium in Benghazi. As he hung from the rope dying, he was grabbed round his legs and dragged down until he stopped moving by a brutal young woman called Huda Ben Amer. Ben Amer was appointed Mayor of Benghazi, and went on to terrorise the people Benghazi for the decades since. She escaped the Benghazi uprising, and is waiting to return if the Libyan army retake control in the next few days.

Al-Sadek’s story matters, not just because of …

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Rebecca Tinsley

Opinion: Khartoum’s Omar Bashir should not be let off the hook

By Rebecca Tinsley | Mon 7th March 2011 - 3:57 pm

As people across North Africa and the Middle East rise up against their oppressive regimes, the international community is preparing to let Sudan’s dictator, Field Marshall Omar Bashir, off the hook for killing millions of his own citizens.

In 2009 the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Bashir for genocide in Sudan’s remote western region of Darfur where his policy of ethnic cleansing led to the deaths of 300,000 people. For years Khartoum used the same tactic, arming poor Arab nomads to kill their black Africa neighbours to similar effect in South Sudan, where an estimated two million died. …

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Nick Lane

Opinion: The UK cannot afford paralysis in its relationship with Europe

By Nick Lane | Thu 24th February 2011 - 3:24 pm

The world is becoming increasingly ‘globalised’ and interdependent, driven by technological innovation and the now virtually unlimited movement of people and capital. This has opened up extraordinary opportunities for businesses and individuals all around the world, but it also poses many problems for national policy makers and governments.

Perhaps the most important and publicised change brought about thus far by the global age is the rise of China and India as economic powerhouses. China is now the second largest economy in the world and will overtake the United States to be the biggest in a couple …

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Mark Pack

Sharon Bowles named most influential Brit in global financial regulation

By Mark Pack | Sun 6th February 2011 - 8:55 am

Sharon Bowles, Liberal Democrat Euro-MP for South East England, is the highest placed British person in the GFS Power 50 list of the most influential figures in global financial regulation.

Sharon BowlesThe list is voted on by readers of Global Financial Strategy, and Sharon Bowles came out twentieth due to her role as Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. This committee of MEPs has an important role in debating and amending European-wide financial regulation, including new rules on bank capital and bankers’ bonuses.

Sharon Bowles came ahead …

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Ron Aitken

Opinion: Tunisia – forgotten backwater of French and US power now a basket case

By Ron Aitken | Fri 21st January 2011 - 11:36 am

Almost ten years ago the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) awarded me a small research grant to go to Tunisia with the aim of charting her growing relationship with the EU. Algeria, Morrocco, ultimately Libya joined an EU free trade deal to open markets and democratise instutions. Ten years on these initiatives have grossly failed in a hail of bloodshed and crack down. The countries of the Maghreb have been given the benefit of the doubt by France, the US and the UK because the Tunisian President Ben Ali – who took power in a coup d’etat in …

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Tunisian Liberals excluded from country’s new political process

By Liberal International British Group | Fri 21st January 2011 - 11:08 am

The confused situation in Tunisia has seen a provisional government formed from which the country’s liberals, the Social Liberal Party, has been excluded. Only representatives of socialist groups and the former ruling party have been given places in the new government,

The Social Liberal Party is a member of Liberal International, which has protested at its exclusion and pointed out that a functioning democracy cannot be formed while all but one part of the political spectrum is omitted from the process. The party’s website is in Arabic only.

Liberal International’s responses can be seen here.

Ronald Meinardus, director of …

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Antonia Mochan

The Independent View: How do you know what to say about Europe?

By Antonia Mochan | Sat 8th January 2011 - 2:25 pm

Rightly or wrongly, the Liberal Democrats are as seen as the most pro-European of the three main political parties. The UK debate on the European Union is often framed in terms of “Europhiles v Eurosceptics”. However, it’s my experience, after 2 and a half years as the European Commission’s head of media in the UK, that most people don’t really have much of an opinion either way. They care about things that affect them personally, and probably don’t see the EU very present in their daily lives. European debates, either in the UK or at EU level, have a tendency …

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Stephen Tall

Flight cancelled or delayed? Reasons to be thankful for EU Regulation 261/2004

By Stephen Tall | Wed 22nd December 2010 - 10:15 am

While the Westminster Village is fixated by the Telegraph-hyped furore that Lib Dem ministers don’t always agree with every aspect of Coalition policy (shock, horror etc), the rest of the country is focused on a British obsession bigger even than the media’s predeliction for attaching the suffix ‘-gate’ to a noun: the weather.

Newspaper and TV pictures have been dominated by images of those hoping for a holiday getaway having their hopes dashed and their tempers frayed by the endless queues and chaos at Heathrow and for the Eurostar. …

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Andrew Duff

Opinion: EU Bill is bad Tory policy

By Andrew Duff | Wed 15th December 2010 - 9:55 am

The European Union Bill is a Tory policy. The Liberal Democrats went into the last election arguing for a referendum on whether the UK should stay in or leave the EU. Thankfully, having lost the election, we were not in a position to test public opinion on that one.

The Conservative party wanted a referendum on the Lisbon treaty in order to repatriate powers and to entrench national sovereignty. On losing the election they discovered that Lisbon was already in force and could not be undone. So their new tactic was to undermine the Lisbon settlement whenever opportunity arose, and it …

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Jeremy Browne MP

Jeremy Browne writes… Given citizens control over future proposals to give the EU more powers

By Jeremy Browne MP | Tue 7th December 2010 - 3:25 pm

Today the Coalition will bring forward legislation to allow every British citizen to have a say on future changes to the EU Treaties where those changes transfer power or competence from Britain to the European Union.

Britain has been a member of the European Union since the 1970s and we have benefited from closer cooperation. We should also remember that the union is one of the greatest successful demonstrations of the expansion of democracy and liberal values in history. From the post-war stabilisation of western Europe to the removal of the Iron Curtain, the European Union has provided its members with …

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David Thorpe

Opinion: Ireland has many economic problems…..but it isn’t an argument against the Euro

By David Thorpe | Sun 21st November 2010 - 1:50 pm

As my native Ireland teeters on the edge of bankruptcy and bailout, sections of the British press have taken the opportunity to view Ireland’s difficulty as the Europsceptic’s opportunity.

Some of the comment has centred around the idea that British taxpayers will be asked to ‘bail out’ their feckless neighbours, as, apparently they were with Greece last year.

This article aims not to explore that argument further, as it is a debate too reliant on uncertain future events, and is framed within a Britsih nationalist context which it is not appropriate for me to explore.

Instead I want to focus on another aspect …

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Shas Sheehan

Opinion: Microfinance epitomises Liberal Democracy

By Shas Sheehan | Wed 17th November 2010 - 10:24 am

Microfinance epitomises Liberal Democracy and we must push the Department For International Development (DFID) to reverse the declining support the Labour years has visited on this decentralised, non-statist and very effective means of lending a hand up to the poorest people on the planet.

In the picture is the cooking stove I bought in Malawi from a gentleman called George (not his real name). George was loaned the money by a microfinance charity so that he could buy sheet metal rather than scavenge for the materials he needed.

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Mark Pack

A self-contained letter to the Daily Express

By Mark Pack | Thu 11th November 2010 - 6:23 pm

This made me smile:

Letter sent to the Daily Express, 10 November 2010

re your article “Cameron must say no to votes for prisoners”

Dear Sir

The EU is always interested in what one of its leading members has to say, but if David Cameron takes Ann Widdecombe’s advice, it won’t get him very far. It is the Council of Europe, a completely separate organisation, that is responsible for the ruling on prisoners’ votes.

Yours faithfully

Antonia Mochan
Head of Media
European Commission Representation, London

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Helen Duffett

Nick Clegg’s speech on European growth

By Helen Duffett | Thu 4th November 2010 - 6:53 pm

This morning Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gave a speech at the Government Leaders’ Forum Europe 2010 in London.

He called for a united response to “a financial crisis that has changed the world” and proposed “four levers for durable, lasting prosperity”:

Openness in trade; more flexible labour markets; greater investment in infrastructure; and a workforce equipped to thrive in the green, digital economy of the future.

Towards the end, he touched on UK university tuition fees and outlined the proposed reforms:

The UK is already blessed with a world-class university sector. But we need to secure it for the future…

Read on:

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David Rendel

Opinion: Not the whole truth

By David Rendel | Sat 30th October 2010 - 5:25 pm

On Monday, while in London for a meeting, I picked up a copy of the Evening Standard. (I can never resist a good freebie – I was once an MP after all –  and besides it gave me three extra Sudokus to do on the train home).

Inside I found four vouchers (one for each of the remaining days of the week) for “i” – Britain’s first new quality newspaper for over two decades. The paper only costs 20p a day. But I am such a sucker for freebies that I just could not resist using the vouchers to try it …

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Julia Bateman

Opinion: the Coalition Government is protecting fair trial rights in Europe

By Julia Bateman | Mon 25th October 2010 - 5:20 pm

The Coalition Government has today announced that it will take part in EU legislation on the right to information in criminal proceedings. The so-called “Letter of Rights”. This is one of a number of steps in the “Roadmap” designed to protect individual rights and raise fair trial standards in Europe. It is a much needed counter-balance to the powers police and prosecutors have when working across-borders.

This Letter of Rights is designed to be a short, standard written statement of basic rights given to a suspect when they are arrested and, importantly, before they are questioned. …

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Iain Roberts

Lib Dem MEP calls for EU budget cuts

By Iain Roberts | Sat 23rd October 2010 - 7:05 pm

Writing on 18th October, Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies called for the European Union to cut its spending, just as national governments across Europe are having to do.

While George Osborne is proposing his cuts package to the House of Commons, Euro-MPs are likely to be voting on the first round of the annual EU budget debate. It seems certain that the European Parliament will end up supporting an increase above the rate of inflation, with our own institution seeking 5.5% more spending “to meet the additional costs of implementing the Lisbon Treaty.”

It is bound to prompt the question of

…

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Iain Roberts

Speed voting European style

By Iain Roberts | Sat 23rd October 2010 - 2:38 pm

Votes at Westminster are painfully slow, as MPs are summoned from far and wide to file past into the voting lobbies.

Not so the European Parliament, which was considering over a thousand amendments to the 2011 budget proposals.

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Antony Hook

Opinion: why we need a European Public Prosecutor

By Antony Hook | Thu 21st October 2010 - 4:21 pm

There are serious cross-border criminals at large in Europe damaging the lives of innocent people. A certain numbers of them are more likely to be dealt with when a European Public Prosecutor is created. The British Government needs to escape the defensive dug-out epitomised by Blair’s “red lines” and fight for the good that co-operation in Europe can bring for all our people. This is a time for leadership.

A federal public prosecutor is provided for in the Treaty of Lisbon with a distinct emphasis on financial crime. I use the f-word, federal, because while it has …

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Laurie Eggleston

Opinion: Let’s talk about Europe

By Laurie Eggleston | Fri 1st October 2010 - 4:40 pm

I’ve been surprised how little trouble Europe has caused the coalition so far. For all that we were vilified as ardent Europhiles during the election, it’s not really been mentioned since. In allowing it to drop off the radar, I think we’re now missing an opportunity.

Labour were always too scared of mention the E-word; so paralysed by their terror of the Mail’s wrath were they. Cameron too seems content to let the issue lie. The Coalition agreement makes it clear in no uncertain terms that this government won’t go anywhere near changing our current relationship with the EU – both …

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Mark Pack

The flaw in war reporting from Afghanistan, or why Robert Peston should not be embedded in a McDonald’s for a fortnight

By Mark Pack | Sun 19th September 2010 - 10:24 am

On Wednesday evening I went to a Frontline Club event titled Who is winning the media war in Afghanistan? and was reminded of the way what journalists call “the kinetic stuff” (that is soldiers and shooting to you and me) dominates mainstream TV footage. The set of clips shown to set the scene at the start of the event were all of the kinetic kind and although during the event some journalists made the point that other types of footage is also used – they also conceded that those other reports are not the ones which grab the public …

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Mark Pack

Bowling over Europe

By Mark Pack | Mon 30th August 2010 - 2:25 pm

The latest edition of Total Politics includes a feature piece about Sharon Bowles, Liberal Democrat MEP and chair of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee:

The Lib Dem MEP is a hugely powerful and yet virtually unknown British politician. She has had far more impact on our legislation than your average Westminster politician…

Although she claims to be “in favour of a healthy, vibrant City,” Bowles uses uncompromising language for bankers. She does not have much time for complaints about traders moving their businesses to other, less tightly-regulated locations. “I don’t actually believe there are only one or two great

…

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Mark Pack

Still the best political advert I’ve seen all year

By Mark Pack | Wed 18th August 2010 - 1:20 pm

The stretch from 7 seconds in until 22 seconds in is fairly normal. But as for the rest…

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Stephen Tall

The Saturday Debate: Should Turkey be admitted to the EU?

By Stephen Tall | Sat 7th August 2010 - 8:45 am

Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate:

In all the recent controversy surrounding David Cameron’s recent foreign policy pronouncements some of the substance has perhaps been lost: here was the leader of a major European country unequivocally urging that Turkey be admitted as a member of the European Union.

This has tended to be an uncontroversial view among the British political classes, who regard Turkey as a vital fulcrum in reconciling the West and the Islamic world. It is far less popular among the voters of Europe, as a …

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Stephen Tall

Cameron admits foreign policy gaffe, mis-speaks that “Iran has got a nuclear weapon.”

By Stephen Tall | Thu 5th August 2010 - 7:55 pm

There will be red faces in Number 10 tonight after the latest foreign policy gaffe from David Cameron. Speaking today at his one of his PM Direct events, the Conservative leader stuck up for Turkey’s application to join the EU, stating it would be able to help Europe address a number of issues:

I think be a good political influence because they can help us solve some of the world’s problems like the Middle East peace process, like the fact Iran has got a nuclear weapon.”

Except Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. His advisors later clarified that Mr Cameron …

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Mark Pack

Lib Dem pressure succeeds as European countries push for tougher action on global warming

By Mark Pack | Thu 15th July 2010 - 8:15 pm

Britain, France and Germany have joined forces this week to call for a major toughening of the EU’s target for greenhouse gasses. They have called for the current target of a 20% cut by 2020 to be increased to 30%.

In a statement they also played up the potential economic benefits of the move, “If we stick to a 20 per cent cut, Europe is likely to lose the race to compete in a low-carbon world to countries such as China, Japan or the US, all of which are looking to create a more attractive environment for low-carbon investment.”

As the

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Jonathan Walls

Opinion: Eurosceptics on the fringes, egg on their faces

By Jonathan Walls | Tue 6th July 2010 - 1:45 pm

Iain Dale is rather keen to make it clear why he sees nothing wrong with accepting paranoid Euroscepticism at face value. Here’s his piece on the wild rumours that the EU hopes to ban selling eggs by the dozen.

I was looking at some of the comments in response to his post, and I don’t think they’re being fair to Iain. Just because he could have looked at a packet of eggs in his fridge and found the information in question is already on the packaging hardly means we should expect such extensive research from him before posting.

He wrote: “It’s written …

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